Well, it was a little anti-climactic, but I graduated to official beekeeper today. The bee place got in their order, and I went down to pick up my box-o-bees:
Whatcha got there is, apparently, 10,000 bees.
Without reproducing what’s on the internet in a million different places, I busted open the box, took out the queen, installed here in the hive, dumped in the bees, installed a feeder, and sealed it back up. It hardly took any time, and honestly, I’m not sure I really needed that silly suit and gloves. They didn’t seem to mind what I was up to.
In the end, they flew around a lot, and eventually, by dark, had completely retreated to the hive. Good thing, too, since I forgot to put the entrance reducer in place.
Anyway, more as the whole bee thing develops, but it seems to have gone off without too much of a hitch. Assuming you’re not the bee that I squished when I replaced the top super. Heh. Oops. Sorry about that.
Speaking of which… one of the coolest things was watching them haul out the corpses from the hive and fly off with them to drop them off elsewhere. Otherwise, if the dead were too heavy, the living would give it a shot and just leave them on the ground if they couldn’t get air. Fastidious little buggers.
Ok, I’ll bite: what’s an entrance reducer?
Ah, yeah, sorry… that is a little piece of wood that you put into the opening to the hive to constrict traffic. The idea is that they all can’t run for the exits, and in the meantime, they start sniffing her highness’s royal stank and decide to stick around. I neglected to put mine in place, and ultimately decided just to skip it. If I get out there tomorrow, and no one’s home… well… lesson learned.
Entrance reducers are particularly important when it is a little cool/cold out too. Bee hives make a lot of heat and mice tend to like to climb in and stay warm. They also tend to mess up a hive. This can only happen, of course, when the bees are clustered (in the cold) and cannot run the mice out….so you will need entrance reducers in late fall through the winter until the spring warms up enough to keep mice out
Ah hah! There ya go. I would not have thought of that. I gotta say, half the fun of the honeybee thing has been hanging out at the supply store with the old coots. There is a definite… schtick that beekeepers do. They’re these dumpy, unshaven guys with this look on their face like “oh, boy, might as well buy this thing now… it’s too late for me… don’t know why I started this…”
Not to say you’re an old coot, Warren… just that you get the best info from talking to people who’ve been at it a while. Makes it much easier to sort out the important stuff from the rest of the junk you’ll read on the net or in a book.
Maybe you are an old coot, though.
I really don’t know. You could be a young coot.
Thanks for the edification. It’d have to be a brave/cold mouse to look for shelter in a beehive!
I get the feeling that in the winter, they’d just as soon stay in their little cluster as chase anything. I have to say, having stood in a cloud of bees on the loading dock to pick up my package (really, a couple of these boxes had busted open apparently) and now working with them a little, I’m surprised at how mellow they are. I often stand out there and watch them come and go, right in front of their hive, and they just fly around me. I’m more worried about accidentally getting one in my clothes or between my fingers than them aggressively coming after me. Of course, I’m not stealing their honey… yet.